The world of Email Marketing is a crowded, ever-changing environment that can provide both feast and famine when it comes to email ROI. The fact is, when done right, Email Marketing can provide 6-8 times the ROI of other marketing outlets.

To achieve the highest return on your Email Marketing investment, it’s important to understand the data you will be mailing to and make sure that, as the marketer, you are doing everything in your power to stay relevant.

Here are a few tips on maintaining relevance in Email Marketing:

1. Keep your content fresh and engaging. Over the weekend, I accessed an old Yahoo email address I hadn’t checked in some time. The inbox was flooded with content I did not care about, but there was one item that did catch my eye. The problem is, I realized the sender had sent me the same email with identical content many times over the last month. A month ago, on the first send, it was likely to have been considered fresh and engaging. After a month of the same thing, not so much.
2. Make sure and follow Email Best Practices. If you do not mail on your own, make sure the Email Service Provider you use to create content and send Email Marketing messages is following set best practices. As the world of Email Marketing gets more crowded, the line between those who do their best to maintain high email standards and those who do not becomes more and more apparent. Don’t be left on the wrong side of ISP spam filters! To access our white paper on Best Practices, click here.
3. Make sure the data you mail to is verified opt-in users and is relevant to the message. By opt-in users, we mean a user who signed up for an offer on a web site or through another method where they provided their email and knowingly agreed at the time of sign up to receive additional offers. It’s best to use your own collected opt-in data whenever possible, but there will be times where relationships are established and you have access to additional email data where you fall under the category of a 3rd-party offer the user agreed to receive when they opted-in to the email list. If this is the case, make sure your email matches the source of that data! For example, sending a video game offer to a list of users who signed up to learn about educational grants is a no-no. An offer for college textbooks to the same list is much more relevant and likely to result in more conversions and less complaints!
4. Know your data and segment your data. As you market more and more to your users, you should be able to identify users who are responding and those who are not. Knowing this can help you focus email campaigns directly to users who are responding to you and help you develop new, engaging content to try and appeal to those who have not yet responded. For more information on segmenting your data, click here.